The Little Rock School Board voted Wednesday to move Hall STEAM Magnet High School Principal Mark Roberts to the central office, effective today, and extend Forest Heights STEM Academy Principal Amy B. Cooper's role to include Hall.
Cooper, whose expanded role will begin July 1, has been principal at Forest Heights, a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school, since 2017. She will be the district's only principal in modern times to oversee a kindergarten-through-12th- grade program in the Little Rock school system.
April Rike, a Hall Magnet High assistant principal, will serve as interim principal at Hall for the remainder of this school year.
Roberts' title is Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief, or ESSER, monitoring and report director.
As such, Roberts will facilitate the use of tens of millions of dollars in federal covid-19 relief funds that the 21,000-student district is to receive.
The Little Rock School Board, using the Zoom online meeting platform, voted 9-0 in public for the personnel recommendations without saying what the recommendations were and with almost no discussion. The board met in a closed session for about 55 minutes before the vote.
After the meeting, Superintendent Mike Poore in response to questions said the monitoring and report director position is a new one in the district and Roberts will report to the district's deputy superintendent, who is currently Jeremy Owoh. Owoh is leaving the district July 1 to become superintendent in the Jacksonville/North Pulaski School District.
Poore said the monitoring and report director position -- which was not advertised before being filled -- will be funded with the federal money.
"With the amount of funds that the Little Rock School District has been granted -- over $90 million -- we have an obligation to coordinate the use of these resources to impact the five targeted areas of food security, learning loss, technology, systemic procedures and facilities.
"As the new director for ESSER funding, Dr. Roberts will work with multiple stakeholders in the Little Rock School District, our community and state officials," Poore said. "This role will need to monitor and coordinate the utilization of these funds so there can be a true accountability to impact our students and our schools."
The action on the leadership role for Hall is the latest in what has been more than a year of high-profile and sometimes hotly contested changes made by the state and by the district for the midtown high school.
The Little Rock School Board at a March 18 meeting committed to three years of district support to the year-old Hall STEAM Magnet High School and its new emphasis on engineering and health sciences. That commitment included linking Hall programmatically and in staffing to Forest Heights STEM Academy, which is a well-established, high-performing and popular school choice for families in the district.
STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, arts and math. STEM is the same without the arts.
District leaders said in March that linking Hall and Forest Heights -- creating a K-12 science and math school model -- will result in a better-aligned, less-repetitive curriculum, including the more coordinated use of the Project Lead The Way-based lessons at the two campuses.
Poore also said at the time that staffing changes are necessary to create cost efficiencies at Hall and Forest Heights, which are in neighborhoods on opposite sides of Mississippi Street.
Hall's long-standing traditional high school program was reconfigured into themed academies, and all staff jobs were vacated and refilled for this 2020-21 school year. The school's attendance zone was eliminated, and the school was opened to students districtwide.
However, because of the onset of the covid-19 pandemic last spring and, as a result, limited student recruiting, the school did not attract enough ninth-graders to have a freshmen class this year, and the school's overall enrollment is under 300 for a campus that can accommodate 1,000 students.
Forest Heights' enrollment is 723, according to a state data base.
As of mid-March about 60 students have registered to be Hall freshmen for the coming year, as have about a dozen for their sophomore year, Poore said.
Hall has two academies -- one for engineering and one for health sciences. Within each academy are different "pathways" or subject areas, such as computer science software development, computer science game design, pre-engineering and integrated manufacturing, biomedical sciences, dental assisting, nutrition and dietetics, and medical office administration.
The academies and career pathways are to tie into the Ford Next Generation Learning model of career academies. The career academies model is being incorporated into all public high schools in Pulaski County in partnership with the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce and area businesses and industries.
Roberts will be paid $112,414 in base salary plus a $3,000 annual educational stipend for his doctorate degree.
Cooper will be paid a base salary of $109,098 plus a $1,500 educational stipend for her master's degree and 30 additional college credit hours, plus a student census stipend based on student population at the two schools.
Cooper began her teaching career with the Little Rock School District in 2005 and has worked in a variety of roles, serving as teacher, counselor, specialist and assistant principal.